[RIP] Mark Hollis – Mark Hollis, 1998

Guest post by Nick Zanca (Quiet Friend / Mister Lies)

I’m 20 years old, leaning against a window of a train from London to Edinburgh. The two other guys I’m traveling with, young producers with MacBooks and MIDI controllers in tow, are sprawled out in the seats across from me, eyes closed, dead to the world. At the start of that year, I had put out an LP (my first) of music I had felt unsure of, spent nearly every weekend of my sophomore spring semester in a different city, spun into a whirlwind, eventually dropping out of college to tour full time. Now it’s summer and I’m abroad and unready, unable to slow my racing mind. Instead, I retreat into my headphones, staring out at the passing Highlands in all their viridescence. In my ears sits a lone voice over a tranquil bed of strings, the ghostly hum of a vibrato circuit on a guitar amp lurking: “step right up / something’s happening here.” Sleeplessness becomes body high as the sun starts to rise.

This is how I fell in love with Laughing Stock. That record, and later Spirit Of Eden, became instant companions through the months of endless travel and alienation that followed. The music of Mark Hollis would only hypnotize; it would help me process the change in direction of my life–a pointillist’s attention to detail, a fluidity I dreamt of possessing, a texture thick to the point of becoming a security blanket. Listening repeatedly, you feel as if you’re walking through an aviary of disparate songbirds, much like those depicted on the artwork, improvising in full awareness of their impermanence. In the midst of mental illness or writer’s block, I always use these records to recalibrate. To me, they’re sound of earth and sky meeting; above all, they taught me to embrace solitude through silence.

That silence is elevated even further on Mark Hollis, the solo record I arrived at later, quietly released seven years after Talk Talk disbanded. All electric instruments and studio magic are eschewed – instead, two microphones are placed at the front of the room, leaving the musicians in pursuit of their proper place in the stereo field as it was in the beginning of recorded sound. What we get, then, is that intimate, transcendental purity found in the films of Bresson or Tarkovsky or the music of Nick Drake or Morton Feldman–existing totally outside of time. Rather than utilizing chance and accident like the two preceding records, everything here was written down and scored–and somehow still, the music appears loosely structured, out of thin air, delicate as stained glass. Woodwind textures spurt, a harmonium breathes deep, cloistral voices whisper soft invocations. Often Mark’s voice will barely rise above the creaking of his chair or a ticking watch. You couldn’t find a quieter pop record if you tried. 

In her essay The Aesthetics Of Silence, Susan Sontag describes art as “a deliverance, an exercise in asceticism.” She says: 

…Formerly, the artist’s good was mastery of and fulfillment in his art. Now, it’s suggested that the highest good for the artist is to reach that point where those goals of excellence become insignificant to him, emotionally and ethically, and he is more satisfied by being silent than by finding a voice in art.

Of course, the relationship Mark Hollis had to silence was never limited to sound–he withdrew completely from the public eye to focus on his family shortly after this record was released. He would claim that the work behind him was so close to how he imagined music that he couldn’t possibly dream of how to move forward from it. Many of us held out for one more record, one more sign of life. It would never come, and even as heartbroken as I am now that he’s gone, to ask for more would be selfish. One listens to these records at least once a week and still learns from them. 

A little over twenty years later, the music industry has eaten itself. As a discovery platform, streaming services reduce even the most unorthodox music down to exclusive, rudimentary listening contexts– dinner parties, “mood boosters,” “lo-fi beats to study to”–as if it wasn’t bad enough that they barely compensate. Young artists online hardly thrive, if ever, on transparency and instant validation–to keep your work close to the chest is somehow to become estranged; we assume the role of “wearing” our music beyond simply letting it sing for itself. At the time of writing this, I’m holed up finishing a project that I struggle with keeping a secret. I’m sometimes so swept up in considering how and where it’ll be placed–contexts that I can’t control, try as I might–that I forget to be honest with myself. I listen to the work my hero left behind and I hear a vision of sound uncompromised, a commitment to the organic, an atmospheric intuition, and those troubles are kept at bay. I’m forever indebted to the standard Mark Hollis set and am inspired to stay true to all of the grey areas. I only hope the people introduced to his work for the first time this week will stumble upon a similar solace. 

If this is your first listen, wait for a quiet moment to press play. In his words, “You should never listen to music as background music.”

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[RIP] Kelan Phil Cohran & Legacy – African Skies, 1993

I was deeply saddened to hear of the passing of legendary jazz trumpeter (and occasional zither player) Kelan Phil Cohran at the age of 90 on Wednesday. While his accomplishments are too significant to fully do them justice, he played trumpet with Sun Ra and His Arkestra, co-founded the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), was a respected educator (one of his students was a young Maurice White), opened the Afro-Arts Theater in Chicago, and invented the Frankiphone (aka space harp), an electric mbira. He also recorded extensively with The Hypnotic Brass Ensemble, a group composed of eight of his sons. Cohran was still regularly performing live until quite recently.

Though African Skies was recorded a later stage in his career (by which point he had already been given the honorific Kelan, meaning holy scripture, by Muslim scholars during a trip to China), it’s considered by many to be a cosmic jazz masterpiece and one of his finest works. His first record since his 1969 Malcolm X memorial, this was recorded live at the Adler Planetarium in Chicago as a glowing tribute to Sun Ra, Cohran’s mentor and friend who had recently passed away. African Skies is mostly acoustic and fairly minimal, but for all its sparsity, it’s hypnotic, deftly expressive, and all the more powerful for doing less. Trumpet, harp, frankiphone, congas, violin uke, guitar, flute, bowed string bass, clarinet, trombone, and vocal riffings by Aquilla Sadalla that, whenever I’ve put this on in social settings, have invariably prompted at least one person to ask what we’re listening to. If the back cover is any indication, this performance looked just as incredible as it sounded.

Though I’ve always considered myself a jazz idiot, this record has been an ideal gateway drug into the worlds of cosmic and spiritual jazz, and I can’t think of a better tribute to Cohran’s legacy than giving this some airtime this weekend. Out of respect for his family I’ll be taking down the download link in the next few days, so if you want it, get it now. Thank you for everything, Kelan Phil Cohran!

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Don Cherry & Latif Khan – Music/Sangam, 1978

Another Don Cherry collision with terrific results. Originally recorded in Paris in 1978, this only had a 1000-copy run in France and, despite being considered one of Cherry’s strongest works by die-hard fans, was mostly forgotten until its reissue in 2009. A fairly early and very successful piece of Indo-jazz fusion–while Cherry had a propensity towards cultural dabbling, he avoided many of the pitfalls of “world music” aesthetic through his commitment to musicianship, collaboration, and sensitivity. Also, he sings a bit!

Ustad Ahmed Latif Khan was a tabla virtuoso, avid composer, and member of the Delhi Gharana. He also had perfect pitch and used it to great advantage, tuning his daya (right drum of the tabla) to the same pitch as his baya (left drum of the tabla)–typically the baya is between a fifth and an octave below the daya, but Khan’s tuning allowed for an unusually deep, full tone of the bass notes. He stood out both for this tonal precision and because of his taste for irregular and extremely syncopated rhythms. From the liner notes:

“Sangam” means “meeting place” in Sanskrit. Don obviously knew exactly what he wanted to do, and Latif immediately understood, his fingers fizzing across the tablas at frightening speed, his perfect pitch making him the obvious person to tune the disparate instruments in Don’s armoury to those in the studio, which included a grand piano, a B3 Hammond organ and chromatic timpani.

 It was Don who suggested that Latif overdub new tabla parts to enrich and add complexity to the first takes. We could reasonably have expected to spend the night doing this because this was the first time the percussionist had done this. It took him all of five minutes to get used to listening to the first tracks over the headphones before playing them without the slightest mistake. When we got to the timpani, which he was playing for the first time, his keen sense of pitch and tone once again did miracles. During one take, just for the fun of it Latif started to play a fairly slow, disconnected duple time, moving on to three and then four… all the way up to 19 by which time his fingers were whizzing invisibly across the skins, leaving us in awe and him looking as if he didn’t know what the fuss was all about. All this just made Don even keener to impress his musical companion for a day… and so he did, with great ease and a complicity created by their shared love of music.

Of course, the subtleties of this album call for greater analysis, for example the meeting between the Malian doussou n’gouni and Indian tablas, the Hammond organ taking over from the tampura, 5 1/4 time as if it were the easiest thing in the world, the reinvented Indonesian gamelan… and the lyricism of the (pocket!) cornet.

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Harold Budd & Hector Zazou – Glyph, 1995

An underloved record from two masters. Trip hop feels like a radical genre departure for both Budd and Zazou, and yet it instantly makes sense upon first listen. Both leave their stylistic fingerprints all over Glyph–Budd’s melancholia, Zazou’s sinister sensibility–weaving haunted ambient jazz into fizzed out drum loops. Trumpet arrangements by Mark Isham, guitar by Barbara Gogan (with whom Zazou also collaborated on a very good trip hop full-length that I’ll be posting at some point), and poetry recitations by Budd. Attains startling heights of opiated beauty (“Reflected in the Eye of a Dragonfly,” featuring a wash of pedal steel guitar courtesy of BJ Cole; sinuous grooves on “Pandas in Tandem” and “As Fast As I Could Look Away She Was Still There”). Does exactly what good trip hop is supposed to do, and then some.

Terry Riley & Don Cherry – Live Köln, 1975

Guest post by Chad DePasquale (Aquarium Drunkard / Pride Electronics)

In 1975, pioneering minimalist composer Terry Riley and jazz trumpet cosmonaut Don Cherry joined forces for a magnetic performance in Köln, Germany. Recorded live, but never commercially released, the concert is something of a hushed treasure, as well as the only record of a profound spiritual experience and meeting of two free form jazz titans. Riley’s swirling synth, droning and clairvoyant and prescient in its clarity, parades along with a triumphant Cherry, leaving behind trails of mystery and a sense of beauty in a larger, more universal form. Side A, the twenty-minute “Descending Moonshine Dervishes,” is a transcendent moment of improvisational experimentation and spiritual jazz. As Cherry’s physical presence slowly liquifies, “the lonesome foghorn blows” into some kind of misty dawn. His mournful trumpet immerses the listener into dense layers of playful percussion and dissonance. When Karl Berger joins the duo on vibraphone for side B, the tone becomes more hypnotic and reedy – a strange mystical noir – with the final three-and-a-half minutes of “Improvisation” exuding a vivid imagination. A lucid and rhythmic front row seat to the startling beauty of minimalist explorations and eloquent fusions of Eastern and Western ideas.

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